reformat in vim for a nice column layout
If you're on some kind of UNIX (Linux, etc), you can cheat and filter it through the column(1) command.
:%!column -t
The above will parse on delimiters inside string literals which is wrong, so you will likely need pre-processing steps and specifying the delimiter for this file for example:
%!sed 's/","/\&/' | column -t -s '&'
Sometimes we want to align just two columns. In that case, we don't need any plugins and can use pure Vim functionality like this:
- Choose a separator. In OP's post this is a comma, in my example this is
=
. - Add spaces before/after it. I use
s/=/= ...spaces... /
in visual selection for this. - Locate to the longest word and place cursor after it.
- Remove all the extra whitespace using
dw
and vertical movement.
Example of this technique demonstrated below:
I don't find myself needing to align things often enough to install another plugin, so this was my preferred way of accomplishing it - especially that it doesn't require much thinking.